by Sid Holt
Throughout her first semester in college, she was dogged by fears of being outed. During winter break, her boyfriend invited her home to Brighton, Michigan. DuBuc agreed, but sheepishly explained that their first stop in town would have to be the police station. Her understanding was that she had to check in with local cops within forty-eight hours of arriving in a new town or face a felony charge.
Her boyfriend parked in the lot of the Brighton Police Post. “I’m here to fill out the paperwork,” DuBuc told the trooper at the front desk. “I’m a registered sex offender.”
“We don’t serve your kind here,” he replied. “You better leave before I take you out back and shoot you myself.”
Back at the car, DuBuc wept. Her boyfriend filed a formal complaint, and eventually a letter arrived from the station’s lieutenant, apologizing for the trooper’s “unacceptable” behavior.
DuBuc felt increasingly unsettled. “I didn’t really have people I could talk to who understood my situation,” she recalls. “I couldn’t talk to my mom—she was going through her own issues—and my dad would feel too guilty. I fell into a deep depression.” She made an effort to stay engaged in the world she still hoped to build, marching with the local living-wage campaign, travelling with her church group to Japan for the summer. At college, where she pursued a double major in comparative religion and social work, she racked up accolades: a Presidential Scholar award, a steady spot on the dean’s list. But, outside of her academics, things seemed only to get worse. As shows like To Catch a Predator debuted and awareness grew, registrant shaming became a popular pastime. Soon, the state legislature voted to require registrants to report their place of work, volunteer activity, and education; new “Predator-Free Zones” were also introduced, prohibiting convicted sex offenders from going within a thousand feet of a school. Many such laws were applied retroactively, lumping juvenile offenses with those of adults.
One morning during her junior year, DuBuc returned to her room from psychology class to find a yellow Post-it on her door: “We know you’re a sex offender. GET OUT OF OUR DORM. You’re not wanted here.” She tore it up, and told no one. A few days later, as she sat in her room working on a paper for class, she heard a ping from her AOL Instant Messenger account. The sender was anonymous. “We know you’re a sex offender,” DuBuc read. “Get out.”
She no longer felt safe in the dorm. But in order to rent her own apartment she’d need a decent income. She applied for jobs that interested her—working with the homeless, helping out an urban ministry—without success. Then McDonald’s, Burger King, and Subway turned her down because of her offender status. For a while, she dropped out of school, returning to Howell and working as a home-health-care aide. But she knew that her best chance of becoming independent was to complete her education. She moved into a homeless shelter in Kalamazoo and returned to class. Eventually, a church friend with whom she’d gone on a mission trip to Japan took her in, letting her sleep on the sofa.
Unable to escape the public registry, DuBuc decided to study it and then take it on. She bought a thick green binder and began to compile research: notes on the historical development of the juvenile-justice system and studies of the registry’s impact on public safety. Finally, she began to write her story. “I’m a loving sister.… I’m an intern for the Kalamazoo City Commission,” she wrote in “So, Who Is Leah DuBuc Anyway?” uploading the essay, along with friendly photographs (Leah with a campus Christian group, Leah arm in arm with her siblings). “I’m an advocate for the homeless, and disenfranchised.… Do I sound like a violent, predatory sex offender to you?”
But vigilantism, too, has found opportunity in transparency. Most state registries publish an explicit warning against using the database for so-called citizen justice. To judge from my conversations with more than forty youth registrants and their families, however, these warnings have done little to prevent threats and violent attacks. Mike Grottalio, in Weatherford, Texas, told me how his daughter, who was sexually abused by her brothers when they were ten and twelve (and she was seven), had suffered further because of her siblings’ registration. After the boys returned from two years of detention, the family dog was shot to death by a neighbor. Then the local paper ran their names and address under the headlines “County Sex-Offender Roundup” and, later, for Halloween, “Know Where the Monsters Are.” More recently, a Molotov cocktail spilled flames across the family’s driveway, and BB-gun pellets were fired at their home’s vinyl siding after a neighbor passed out warning flyers. “It’s made outcasts of our whole family,” Grottalio said of the registry. “The damage has been done. There’s no repairing it.”
In a small, religious neighborhood of Pinesdale, Montana, Heidi Nuttall described how locals held a meeting about her son—a registrant since the age of fourteen—that amounted to something “just short of a lynch mob.” Soon afterward, someone fired a BB gun at the door of the home where her son slept. A third mother, from Missouri, showed me photographs sent to her by local registrants who had apparently been singled out for retribution. She’d blown the pictures up to poster size, showing them to anyone who would look. One featured a registrant’s face that resembled a smashed tomato: two men had broken into his home and bashed him with a tire iron.
In recent years, mothers like these have come together in groups like Women Against Registry, and they’ve begun showing up at the same events as Stacie Rumenap’s Stop Child Predators, sharing their own stories. Rumenap, for one, has little sympathy for those in the group advocating for husbands or adult sons who have been convicted of harming children; she isn’t convinced that most convicted adults should get a second chance. But the stories of juveniles on the registry have increasingly swayed her. “Never in our wildest dreams were we going state by state asking lawmakers to punish juveniles,” she told me, of her early years of lobbying for registry laws. “You can’t handle these types of kids—and they’re kids—in the same way you handle an adult and expect them to be rehabilitated.”
Back in 2006, she helped bring a Florida father, Mark Lunsford, to Capitol Hill, to tell the story of how his daughter, Jessica, had been kidnapped, raped, killed, and buried by a man with a long history of abusing children. Together, they lobbied for the passage of Jessica’s Law, in Florida and beyond. But, soon afterward, Rumenap learned that Lunsford’s eighteen-year-old son had been arrested in Ohio, for heavy petting with a fourteen-year-old. Now the teen faced inclusion on the very registry that his father had fought to bolster in his murdered sister’s name. “When these laws started getting implemented and enforced, we didn’t realize what would happen,” Rumenap told me. “Now here we are, stuck asking, How do we solve this problem?”
• • •
Leah DuBuc’s study of the registry evolved into an encyclopedia on juvenile registration. Under the tab “Definitions, History, and Origins,” she charted the creation of the Adam Walsh Act and how use of the registry varied from state to state. In South Carolina, she noted, a nine-year-old could be placed on the registry for life. Other states, including New York and Georgia, defied the act’s requirements and declined to place children in their online databases, at the risk of losing funds.
DuBuc had come from a tight-lipped family—even today, some of her relatives have no idea why she was suddenly whisked away from home in sixth grade. But she began writing letters to every local power broker she could think of, asking for a second chance and pleading for the same consideration to be extended to others who faced charges as juveniles. She took her story to the state legislature and urged legal reform, calling for juveniles to be removed from public registries. “I am not alone,” she testified. At the very least, she told the state senate, youthful offenders deserved a chance to have their cases reviewed for risk and fairness.
Then she waited. In Lansing, a reform bill stalled, then failed. A letter came from a judge, apologizing that her record couldn’t be expunged under current law. In 2008, when DuBuc graduated with a master’s degree in social wo
rk, she had earned academic honors but her efforts to either clear or seal her juvenile record had gone nowhere, and she could find few decent prospects for employment.
So DuBuc left her green binder at her father’s house, gave away much of what she owned, and stuffed her favorite sweaters, a Bible, and her CD collection into two duffel bags. America no longer had a place for her, she decided. And, although she didn’t want to separate herself from her friends and her family, she felt that she had no choice but to leave the country.
• • •
In rural Minnesota, Patty Wetterling had, by the late 2000s, devoted more than two decades of her life to keeping young people safe. First, she and her husband established a child-advocacy group, the Jacob Wetterling Resource Center. Then came a brief foray into politics—she ran for Congress in 2006, as a Democrat against Michele Bachmann, touting her years of fighting for “tough penalties for those who harm children”—and a long period of service as the chair of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
With each passing year, Wetterling learned more about the costs and the causes of sexual harm. She studied the prevalence of the problem (vast), its perpetrators (trusted familiars far more often than strangers), and its most effective remedies (programs centered on open lines of communication in households, schools, and communities). Her first major clue that juvenile registration might demand closer scrutiny came in the 1990s. She had been touring the country, speaking out against the sexual exploitation of children, when she got an invitation to visit a juvenile-sex-offender treatment facility in Alabama. There she met a child who had just spent his tenth birthday at the institution. “He was nine when he first went into treatment,” she told me. “I was overwhelmed by that. I kept thinking about this kid, who goes away, gets sex-offender treatment, then goes back to his junior high school, and is on the public registry—this young person who really wants to return to school, to learn, to make friends, but can’t have a second chance. That’s a life sentence for this kid.” Still, she focused on child sex-crime victims, and it was easy to understand the common thirst for retribution among fellow parents: “You can see the fear and anger, as a parent. I get that.”
In 2007, Wetterling took a job with the Sexual Violence Prevention Program at the Minnesota Department of Health. She received a call from a Minneapolis mother who wanted to tell the story of her son, and soon followed up with a letter from him. “My name is Ricky,” it began, “and I’m a 19-year-old Registered Sex Offender.” The letter described how, at sixteen, Ricky had met a girl at a teen club who said she was nearly sixteen. They’d had consensual sex on two occasions, according to the note. Later, Ricky wrote, it came out that the girl was thirteen, and he was prosecuted for “Sexual Abuse, 3rd degree,” and placed on the public sex-offender registry; it left him and his family “shattered.”
By then, Wetterling had watched the registry evolve into something very different from what she’d fought to create. The database was no longer for the private use of law enforcement. Nor was it confined to high-risk offenders or adults who targeted kids. (In some states, the registry pooled juveniles and those charged with public urination together with adults who had repeatedly raped children.) It also imposed a costly burden on law enforcement—time and money that might have gone for supervision of the highest-risk offenders and the training of officers in preventive measures.
Wetterling began to talk to Ricky. He was “a young man with so much to contribute to the world,” she told me, but his attempts to lead a better life had time and again been thwarted by registration. Ricky’s letter also raised questions, for Wetterling, about the “Romeo and Juliet” problem—consensual teen-sex prosecutions. These included not just juveniles but also young adults, eighteen and older, who could be tried and sentenced accordingly. In at least twenty-nine states, Human Rights Watch reports, consensual sex between teenagers can trigger registration. There have been scattered efforts at reform, including in Texas. But for many people found guilty of sex offenses, including Anthony Metts, in Midland, they came too late.
• • •
Metts settled into his new life in the oil fields, reluctantly accommodating an array of strictures that he regarded as pointless. Each Halloween, for instance, he reported to the county probation office with dozens of other local sex offenders, and was held from six to ten p.m. and shown movies like Iron Man 2, until trick-or-treating was over. “If someone’s that dangerous that they need to be locked up, what about all of the other three hundred and sixty-four days of the year?” he asked me.
In 2006, he fell in love with a deputy sheriff’s daughter. One night, he took her out to his favorite Italian place in Odessa, ordered two steaks with risotto, and arranged for the waiter to bring out a dessert menu that read, among the à la carte selections, “Will you marry me?” She said yes, and a baby girl soon followed. “My daughter was a blessing and a miracle to me,” Metts told me. But it also introduced him to a troubling new aspect of his life on the registry.
Metts, then twenty-four, learned that he wouldn’t be allowed to see his daughter. His status banned him from living with her and thus with his wife. Still, Metts sneaked visits, breaking the rules. His mother, Mary Helen, obtained formal certification as a chaperon so that he could see his daughter in her presence, spending Saturday mornings by the duck pond or having brunch at Fuddruckers. Eventually, as his daughter grew, Metts says that his probation officer granted him approval for simple, unchaperoned outings, like crafting trips to Hobby Lobby, with a stop for doughnuts.
One night, a former classmate saw Metts buying a sandwich at Walmart and shouted a slur at him; she’d seen his face on the registry for “Sexual Assault of a Child.” Rattled, he went to Buffalo Wild Wings to down a beer and got busted. Metts had a record of technical violations, so a judge ordered him to wear an electronic ankle bracelet, administered by a private monitoring company that charged several hundred dollars a month. The device would notify the authorities of any infractions—stepping too close to a mall, park, bar, or church, or leaving the county without permission.
The circumference of permissible life kept shrinking. “A flame inside of me just went out,” Metts told me. In the darkness that followed, he recalls, “I hermited myself.” He moved back in with his parents, to save money for his child and for his electronic-monitoring bills. Most days, he’d drive straight home from work to play Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas on his Xbox. Within a year and a half, he had gained a hundred pounds. He didn’t want his scarlet letter to further affect his wife and child; the couple got divorced.
In the eighth year of his ten-year probation term, Metts decided to reenter the world. He returned to college, began to party, and made friends for the first time in years. On a warm afternoon in May during his final year of probation, he invited some of those new friends over to his parents’ swimming pool. He tossed back several beers and took a dip. He’d failed to charge his ankle bracelet properly, and the battery died at around 5 PM. Shortly before midnight, his probation officer arrived at his door: she’d be filing to revoke his probation. A few weeks later, Metts was led into a courtroom in handcuffs, leg cuffs, and a chain around his waist connecting them. “I looked like Hannibal Lecter without the mask,” he told me. The judge’s name sounded familiar: she had helped prosecute his original case. (The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals has since agreed to consider whether her involvement in the earlier proceedings disqualified her from presiding over Metts’s fate.)
The prosecutor pushed for two years in prison, arguing that the long list of Metts’s technical infractions was “not just a fluke … not just ‘Oops, I messed up.’ ” Metts’s attorney urged alternatives that would be less costly for taxpayers. None of Metts’s violations, he noted, had any connection to the original charges of sexual assault of a child. A typical mistake was failing to charge his ankle bracelet’s battery. The judge took some time to think it over. The next morning, she sentenced Metts to ten years in prison.
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p; • • •
In many states, compliance with the registry can prove to be a Sisyphean task. In McMinnville, Oregon, I met with Catherine Barnes, whose son, Christian, had been placed on a sex-offender registry for life after a sexual encounter, at the age of seventeen, with a thirteen-year-old girl. (In Oregon, the age of consent is eighteen.) Barnes told me that years of treatment, documenting “his masturbation and all that jazz,” and a life confined by the registry’s restrictions had changed him “one hundred percent.”
McMinnville is a town built on second chances. In the past few decades, it had lost its Hewlett-Packard and Pillsbury plants. But, as domestic-wine prices have surged in recent years, tasting bars have cropped up in the wine-country town, filled with tea lights and tourists. At a bright new bistro, Barnes showed me a video on her iPhone. “This was the happiest I’ve ever seen him,” she said. Christian, in his late twenties, was rapping the lyrics to Vanilla Ice’s “Ice Ice Baby” while seated in class at a windmill-repair school; he was physically hulking, but he shared his mother’s blond hair and high cheekbones.
“A lot of doors would have opened for Christian if we could have gotten him off the registry,” his attorney, Claire Brown, had told me at her Portland office. (Brown represented Christian through the CLiF Project, which helps provide legal aid to people placed on Oregon’s sex-offender registry for juvenile adjudications.)
After our meal, Barnes took me to her house, where Christian had lived with her. “I’ll show you where it happened,” she told me, leading me by the arm to a small mauve bedroom, where a decade-long registration story had, not long ago, come to an end.